Hello people! Almost a week ago, in a topic on 4chan's board /m/, a user by the name of Steve announced he was making a menu-translation of the game Super Robot Wars GC for the Nintendo Gamecube taking advantage of the "load custom textures" feature of Dolphin. Most of us (or at least me) had not even the slightest idea about that being a possible thing until then.

The thing is, we ran a couple of tests and discovered that the dialogue boxes of the game were stored as single textures (at least the ones outside battle). We edited a couple of them with positive results, but it was easy to see it was a tiring task, and thus the idea of translating the game seemed quite unlikely. I gave it a bit of thinking, and realized it was possible to create a simple tool to skip the whole editing process, and last night I released version 1.0:

After releasing it, a number of enthusiastic users tried the application with mixed results. After some testing, we realized that when dumping the texture associated to one dialogue, we were all getting different names for our dumped texture. Some googling gave us some more clues as to what was happening, mostly from the format used in the name of the textures. One example of a texture name would be the following:

GRWJD9_aff2ae7f_9.png

We know they follow the pattern <game ID>_<hash of the texture>_<mode?>. Looking through this forum I read that textures ending in "_9" are palletted textures and the problem we were experiencing seems to be common (because of... TLUTs?). I know some users have made "HD Remasters" of games using this technique, so I come here looking for their help (I originally intended to post this in the Hi-Res Texture Packs board, but I have no permission).

I need to understand how the hashing part of the filename is generated for the textures, and if it can be predicted somehow. Right now I'm upgrading the tool to v1.1 so that it can handle 4 possible filenames (in the -vain?- hope that no more than 4 different names can be given to the same texture), but I don't think that will be a good enough solution. For all we know, even the CPU or the graphics card could be affecting said hashing, because we're all using the same version of Dolphin (3.0) with the same settings (Safe Texture Cache, basically). How can we deal with this problem?

Feel free to try the tool, and if anyone can and want to help (s)he's welcome.

PS: sorry about the long post.

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EDIT:

Well, looks like the problem we had with the textures has been solved. Actually it was a misunderstanding, some people weren't using Dolphin 3.0 and were getting the wrong textures as a result. The translations are working now (for that version).

Our so far only translator, Oppai-Missile, has translated the first three scenes of the first chapter (female main character, real robot route). You can test them by yourselves:

mediafire.com/?bmj636h3w45lzzd

Just make sure you're using Dolphin 3.0 with "Load custom textures" activated and "Textures settings" at Safe (left of the slidebar). Extract the textures in /User/Load/Textures/GRWJD9